One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, chaired by Nicholas Negroponte,
has taken a body blow with the news that the government of Hugo Chavez
has placed an order for a million laptops for Venezuela's
schoolchildren with one of the organisation's biggest rivals.
OLPC
is a non-profit body that was founded in the US in 2005. The
organisation's purpose is to oversee the creation of an inexpensive
educational device for distribution to school children in the
developing world and it's main aim has been, by this year, to provide
the devices at the cost of just US$100 each.
However getting the price down to that level by the organisation's
self-imposed deadline has proved problematical and the current cost of
an OLPC computer is actually closer to $200 than $100. (The latest
price information available shows that each machine costs about $180 to
produce but, the OLPC says, this should drop to "about $140 in the
fairly near future.")
It was hoped that the sheer economy of scale of manufacturing millions
of the ruggedised devices would quickly drive down the unit cost down
to the target $100 or perhaps even less but OLPC has also found it more
difficult than expected to raise sufficient interest in some parts of
the developing world and this has impacted adversely on the project. To
date the initiative has not been the global success that was expected
and, despite all the promotion and goodwill, has, so far, been
something of a damp squib.
The announcement that Venezuela is to buy the Magellan, a version of the Intel Classmate computer.
This is an
alternative device designed specifically for use in schools and a order
of this magnitude is certain to put more pressure on the OPLC. Intel
was once a member of the association but resigned its membership in
early January this year, citing disagreements with Mr. Negroponte.
The Venezuelan order is part of $3 billion bilateral trade agreement
with Portugal and the devices are being manufactured in Lisbon, under
licence from Intel, and feature low-power Intel Atom chipsets. The
Magellan also comes complete with inbuilt broadband connectivity and a
digital camera. The machine's operating system will run a version of
Linux that has been specially developed in Venezuela.
The Portuguese government, as part of its policy to provide a laptop
computer to every has child in the country between the ages of six and
ten, has already bought half a million of the Magellan machines.
From : http://web20.telecomtv.com/
